Spirit and Matter, Life and Death

Schmidt Number: S-3355

On-line since: 31st May, 2016

The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul

Berlin, 31 March 1917

The
big progress of natural sciences is admired rightly. The
present human being rightly likes to put himself in the way of
thinking from which this progress of natural sciences has
originated. However, thereby his thinking accepts certain
forms. One has to say that just because many people project
their thoughts in the scientific mindset they cannot be
attentive to that which gives knowledge of the nature of the
human soul and mind which gives knowledge of the most important
riddles of human existence.

One
gets if one pursues the course of the history of mind not only
a general idea of this incapacity. If one looks in detail at
what one has tried to perform just in the area of psychology in
our time, one gets the impression directly that people with
scientific mindset often disregard the points where knowledge
of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of
existence should arise. I want to choose the explanations of a
thinker whom I have often mentioned here who can be respected,
indeed, as someone who tried to exceed the only external,
sensory existence and to point to something that lives in the
spiritual behind the sensory. I would like to take certain
thoughts as starting points which Eduard von Hartmann
(1842-1906), the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down in
the beginning of his Psychology. He says there that it
is actually impossible to observe the soul phenomena, and that
psychology is almost unable to observe the soul phenomena. Let
us look at Hartmann's thoughts in this direction. He says:

“Psychology wants to state what is given; for that it has
to observe it above all. However, the observation of the own
soul phenomena is something special, because it interferes and
changes that without fail to which it is directed to a lower or
higher degree. Someone who wants to observe own tender feelings
does considerably change these emotions by his
attention.”

Hartmann means, one cannot observe the soul, because one has to
observe emotions if one wants to observe the soul; but if one
turns the attention to a tender feeling, it disappears in the
soul; the soul escapes as it were from observation.

“Nay, they can even go through his fingers like water. A
slight physical pain is increased by observation.”

He
means, pain is a soul experience; yes, but how can we observe
it? How can we find out what is there if pain lives in the soul
in such a way that it becomes stronger if we start observing
it. So it changes. We change what we want to observe by
observation. On the other hand:

“If we recite anything, we may get stuck and we are
confused if we want to ascertain the course.”

He
means that it is a soul phenomenon if we recite anything.
However, if now we want to start watching what happens there,
actually, while we are reciting, we cannot do that. So we
cannot observe this soul phenomenon of reciting. He
continues:

“Strong feelings or even affects, like fear and rage,
make us incapable to observe own soul phenomena. Observation
falsifies the result, while it brings that into the given only
which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to
concretise the psychic experiences of the present moment in
such a way that one makes them the object of a coincident
observation; either the experience does not let the coincident
observation arise, or the observation falsifies and suppresses
the experience.”

We
realise that here somebody, as it were, recoils from the
observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I
want to grasp the psychic, I just change it by this psychic
activity of grasping it. Therefore, an observation is
impossible — Hartmann means.

Indeed, this is an exceptionally interesting example of the
wrong tracks that just this research takes because of a certain
inability. What would one gain then, actually, if we were able
to observe, for example, a tender feeling really?

A
tender feeling would remain completely the same what it is if
it were observed in the soul. We would find out nothing but
what the tender feeling is by observation. Nothing about the
soul. That applies also to the other examples that Hartmann
brings in. Since it matters that that never appears which we
call soul in that what the moment offers. The soul can only
face us really if we experience the changes of the single soul
experiences. If we wanted to observe what exists in the soul at
a moment, we would resemble someone who walks to a field in a
certain season and sees the brown mould, and says to himself,
this brown mould is spread out there. After a certain time he
walks again to this field which is now green. Does he not say
then if he is reasonable: the brown mould that I have seen
recently has not shown everything that exists there? Only
because I have observed the change at different times, I find
out that there is not only mould spread out, but also that it
has contained many sprouting seeds in itself.

Thus, the psychic presents itself if we become attentive: a
tender feeling is extinguished if I turn a strong thought to
its observation. This cooperation of the tender feeling and the
strong observing thought is only the work of the psychic. So
Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe what
changes, while he should just observe the change. If he started
from a viewpoint that goes deeper into the soul life and into
the connection of the soul life with the physical life, then he
would say the following, for example, about memorising. He
would recognise that memorising is based on the fact that
something mental which you have often exerted has imprinted
itself in the bodily processes so that the body lets
automatically happen while reciting the memorised, as it were,
without the soul being present what has to happen, so that the
things to be memorised re-emerge. Someone who knows to observe
soul experiences knows that by memorising the soul as it were
moves deeper into the body that it thereby is active more in
the body than if we form present thoughts by direct
contemplation that we have not memorised. However, if we let
that automatically proceed which we have imprinted in the
bodily from the mental, we disturb this automatism if we
intervene with an immediately present thought which originates
a level higher, namely in the soul.

You
realise at once considering such things that Hartmann regrets
that the different kinds of mental and bodily activities
co-operate.

Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often falsifies
the mental.”

Now, the usual science has more or less abandoned from really
observing the mental during the last decades, at least from
methodically observing the soul. However, certain flashes of
inspiration appeared. Just those had such flashes of
inspiration who the academic philosophers do not appreciate so
much. Thus, for example, Nietzsche (Friedrich N., 1844-1900)
had some flashes of inspiration. While he grasped the soul life
more and more brilliantly but increasingly pathologically and
recognised that that which proceeds on the surface of it is
very different from that which happens in the depths of the
human life.

One
needs only to read such things like Nietzsche's discussions
about the ascetic ideal to which some people dedicate
themselves, and you will realise what I mean here, actually.
How does one often describe the ascetic ideal? Well, one
describes it in such a way that one has in mind on what someone
prides himself who dedicates himself to asceticism in the usual
sense: the fact that the human being himself practises more and
more to neutralise his will and to become more and more
weak-willed and unselfish. From this line of thought the
ascetic ideal forms. Nietzsche asks, what is then, actually,
behind this ascetic ideal? He recognises that someone who lives
according to an ascetic ideal wants to get power. If he
developed only his usual soul life, he would have a lower power
than he wants to have. Hence, he practises his will, apparently
to decrease it. However, in the depths of his soul he wants to
attain big power just while he decreases his will. The will to
power is behind the ideal of the lack of will, of
unselfishness. That is Nietzsche's opinion. Indeed, a flash of
inspiration is in it that should be regarded with the
judgement, in particular with the self-knowledge of the human
being.

We
take a more obvious example. A person wrote to me once, I
devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I do
not have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction,
but I consider it as my duty to be active in this direction
because the present humanity needs it. I would rather do,
actually, everything else than just that what I carry out
there. I did not feel embarrassed to answer to the man
concerned, he would appear as someone who has a superficial
view of his soul. Deeply in the subconscious about which he
knows nothing, a greed exists which wants to carry out just
that about which he said that it is actually unpleasant to him,
that he accepts it only as a mission. In truth, I said, the
whole matter appears to me in such a way that he considers it
as a mission because he wants to practise just these things due
to the most selfish motives. There you can realise without
going deeper into the soul life that the superficial soul life
almost falsifies the subconscious one. However, this falsifying
is just a strange activity of the soul.

Eduard von Hartmann just got to his hypothesis of the
unconscious from such lines of thought as I have stated them,
and because he did not pursue such lines of thought further,
which I have added. He says: from that what happens in the soul
as thinking, feeling, and willing what one has there as
consciousness in the soul one can attain, actually, no view of
the real soul. But because one has only this, one has generally
to renounce a view about the real soul life and can put up only
a hypothesis. That is why Hartmann puts up the hypothesis:
behind thinking, feeling, and willing is the unconscious that
you can never reach. From this unconscious the thoughts,
feelings, and will impulses are surging up. However, what is
down there in the unconscious, about which you can only have
thoughts that are more or less probable but that are only
hypotheses.

One
has to say, someone who thinks in such a way obstructs the
access to the soul life, to that what is beyond the usual soul
life. Since Hartmann properly recognised that everything that
is in the usual consciousness is nothing but picture. This
belongs to the merits of Hartmann that he stressed repeatedly:
what is in the usual consciousness originates because the soul
gets its content reflected from the body, so that we have
reflections only of that what we experience in thinking,
feeling, and willing. Talking about the fact that in these
reflections of the consciousness something real is contained
resembles the assertion that the pictures that we perceive from
a mirror are real. We come back just to this matter today.
However, Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers obstructed
the possibility to themselves to penetrate into the soul
because they had an indescribable fear of the way which leads
into the soul. However, this fear remains in the subconscious;
it projects in the usual consciousness in such a way that one
leads himself to believe in numerous reasons that say, you
cannot exceed certain limits of knowledge.

Somebody who wants to penetrate really into the soul life must
not stop at the usual consciousness, but go over to that what I
have called the “beholding consciousness,” to a
higher consciousness compared with the usual one. I have taken
the following comparison: the human being lives in pictures
while sleeping. The visions become conscious up to a certain
degree. I have said in previous talks, the essentials are that
the human being cannot relate his will to the things in the
surroundings in these visions. At the moment of awakening, that
remains which appears as pictures as it is in the dream; but
now the human being relates to the surroundings with his will,
and he integrates what proceeds in the dream usually only as
pictures into his sensory surroundings. As well as now the
human being wakes from the dream consciousness, he can manage
by certain exercises to wake from the usual awake consciousness
to a “beholding consciousness” by which he now does
not integrate himself into the usual sensory world but into the
spiritual world. With this beholding consciousness, the human
being can penetrate into the beyond of the soul phenomena.

Just the most enlightened men of the present believe that one
commits a sin against knowledge if one states that the human
being is able to advance to such a beholding consciousness.
Some people, especially philosophical ones, simply dismiss this
beholding consciousness as a kind of clairvoyance. But the
matter is in such a way that one can characterise it maybe best
of all if one characterises the immense progress which took
place in the relation of the human being to reality from Kant
to Goethe. However, with it one commits a sin against the
spirit of many philosophers. However, one has to commit this
sin once. Kantianism started erecting barriers of human
knowledge within the continental mental development.

The
“thing in itself” is there put as something
transcendent that the human knowledge cannot reach. Thus,
Kantianism wants it, and thus many people of the nineteenth
century, even of the twentieth century, want it with
Kantianism. Goethe argued something very important against this
principle of Kantianism in few short sentences. One could
regard, actually, his small essay On the Beholding
Judgement (1820) which is normally printed in his
scientific writings as one of the greatest actions of modern
philosophy, simply because in that what lives in this small
essay, the starting point is given of a big development of the
human spiritual life. Goethe says in this essay, Kant excludes
the human being from the thing in itself and accepts only that
the categorical imperative projects in the soul that orders
what he should do. But if one should rise to the moral, Goethe
thinks, to the ideas of freedom, of immortality, why should it
be impossible to the human being to rise immediately also with
his knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom
are rooted?

Goethe calls such a faculty of judgement that puts itself in
such a world the beholding faculty of judgement. Goethe
practised this beholding faculty of judgement perpetually in
his considerations of natural phenomena. He gave a great
example looking at the forms of plants and animals how you can
apply the beholding faculty of judgement. Kant considered this
beholding faculty of judgement as something demoniacal that one
should absolutely leave that one should disregard. He called
the use of this beholding faculty of judgement “the
adventure of reason.” Goethe said against him, why should
one not pass the adventure of reason courageously if one has
tried to recognise in such a way as I did how the spirit lives
in the natural phenomena?

However, with it only a beginning is given, but the beginning
of a development that proceeds in such a way, as I have
characterised it in these talks. I also want to point again to
the fact that you find information and indications in my
writings what you have to carry out to get from the normal
consciousness to the beholding one. I described that, for
example, in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?, in Occult Science. An Outline and in my
last book The Riddle of Man. As well as the soul has to
invigorate itself so that it wakes within a world that is now
also another in comparison to the usual day consciousness, as
the usual sensory world of the day consciousness is different
from the mere imagery of dreams. Out from the usual awake
consciousness into a world of the beholding consciousness: just
the excellent thinkers of modern time have avoided this way so
much. One has the peculiar phenomenon that just the most
enlightened heads stopped at Kant and did not find the way from
Kant to Goethe to advance to the beholding consciousness which
is only another form of that what Goethe meant with his
beholding faculty of judgement.

Then, however, the human being attains the Imaginative
knowledge at first that is not called “Imaginative”
because it is something imagined, but because it lives in
images that are not taken from the sensory world, but from a
more intensive reality. Then the human being really lives in
the etheric. With the usual awake consciousness, we become
aware of the outer sensory world. With the Imaginative
consciousness, we enter another world in which other things and
beings are than in the usual sensory world. For somebody who
still has no idea of this beholding consciousness it is indeed
difficult to form a mental picture of it. That is also, why
some dear listeners have said to me in the last times that they
understand just these talks difficultly. The talks are not
difficult in relation to the informed facts, but they are
difficult because they deal with something that does not exist
for the usual consciousness. They talk about results that are
based on the beholding consciousness. But one can get an
approximate idea also in the usual consciousness of that which
is, actually, the very first of the beholding consciousness.
Position yourself in a rather vivid morning dream from which
you wake, and try to remember such a dream in which you have
tried to live intensely. There you will have experienced that
you have to imagine that which you feel connected as thoughts
with your body as it were spread about the continuously flowing
visions. You cannot distinguish yourself from that which is
flowing in the visions, as you can distinguish yourself saying,
I am standing here and I think about the things that are
outdoors.

You
do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you
have the experience directly: in that which surges up and down
there, the forces are which are active, otherwise, in my
thinking. It is, as if you yourselves submerge in the
objectively flowing life of the forces of thought. What one can
imagine in the dream life only suspecting is particularly
discernible in the beholding consciousness as a first
impression. There you can no longer think, the objects are
outdoors and I think about the objects within my head. No,
there you feel embedded in a surging substantial sea in which
you yourselves are a wave. The power of thought is not only in
you, it is outdoors, it causes this waving and surging, this
goes outward, inwards. That is, you feel once connected with
it, then you feel that the power of thought is outdoors and
flows there without you.

What one reaches this way while something substantial is
connected with that which lives, otherwise, only in us as a
thought is the real ether. Since the ether is nothing but
something subtler substantial which is so ensouled everywhere
that flowing thinking works in it that in reality thoughts
fulfil the ether outdoors. Only in this manner, by development
of your consciousness, you attain what one should really call
ether. Then you also attain a more intimate relation between
your soul and the surroundings. If you face the surroundings
with your senses, you can never get such an intimate relation
to the surroundings, as you have in this experience of the
beholding consciousness which has really no borders between
inside and outside, but where the ether penetrated and ensouled
with thoughts flows into your soul life and flows from your
soul life.

However, not before you have entered into this beholding
consciousness, a higher self-knowledge can come into being. I
have here to note something now that belongs again to the
important results of spiritual research; however, it will go
over also into the scientific research, in so far as this will
find the confirmation of it as it will find the confirmation of
those results of spiritual research which I have put forward in
previous talks. Since the human being is a complex being, even
if we look only at his body from without. If Goethe's point of
view had become fertile sooner, one would also have applied
Goethe's theory of metamorphosis to the human being. Goethe
distinguished very nicely in what way with the plant the green
leaf and the coloured petal are the same, only on different
levels of existence, the latter is only a transformation
product, a metamorphosis of the former. If one does not take
the only theoretical thinking as starting point, but the view
which lived in Goethe and applies this metamorphosis view to
the human being in his whole complexity, you get around to
recognising that the human being, while he carries a head and
has the other organism, is a very strange being.

If
one looks at the human being as he develops from the first
childhood on and on, something of the variously important faces
you which science does not appreciate enough today. I would
like to stress only that in the very first childhood the head
is bodily mostly developed. The head increases in seize four
times in the whole life, while the rest of the organism
increases in seize twenty times. Consider how different the
speeds of the growth of the head and of the rest of the
organism are. This is because head and the rest of organism are
two different metamorphoses of the very same, but in a quite
peculiar kind. The head appears straight away in a certain
perfection; the rest of the organism is very imperfect compared
with this, has to develop only slowly to the degree of
perfection which it should reach in the physical life. I have
mentioned already once that spiritual science shows where from
this comes. The head points back to a long preceding spiritual
development. We come while we embody ourselves as
mental-spiritual beings from a spiritual world. What we
experience there contains a sum of forces that develop mainly
in the head at first; hence, the perfection of the head points
to a development that the human being has behind himself.

The
rest of the organism is as it were the same on an initial
level. As paradoxical as it sounds, but it is this way. The
head shows that it is a metamorphosed rest of the organism; the
rest of the organism shows that it does not yet have become
head. As well as the green leaf is not yet a petal, the
coloured petal is a transformed leaf. That which the human
being develops with the rest of his organism is assimilated in
the soul. If the human being dies, that enters a spiritual
world and develops between death and a new birth, which becomes
the forces in a later life, which form the head, as well as the
present head has developed from the organism of a former life
on earth.

You
can ask now, how can one know such a thing? You can know such a
thing, as soon as you have the beholding consciousness. Since
that really appears there what compels you to consider the
human being as this duality: the human being of the head and
the human being of the rest of organism. The head is as it were
a tool of the etheric world as I have just described it, and
the rest of the organism is a tool of this etheric world,
too.

The
human being has his physical organism not only like a section
of the whole physical world, but he has, held together by the
physical organism, an etheric organism in himself which you can
only perceive with Imaginative knowledge. However, if you look
at that which is etheric, then you realise the big difference
between the etheric body of the head and that of the rest of
the organism. Just as the head and the rest of the organism
have quite different speeds of growth, their parts of the
etheric body have quite different forces which cause different
inner Imaginations. If one generally gets to the Imaginative
world, you realise the interplay of the Imaginations of the
etheric body of the head and of the rest of the organism.

This living cooperation in the human etheric organism is the
contents of a higher self-knowledge. Because the human being
recognises himself now really he can also assess certain soul
experiences correctly. If that which I have stated were not in
such a way as I have described it, the human being would never
be able to remember. He would be able to form mental pictures
after the sensory impressions, but they would always pass.

We
can remember something, because the etheric body of the head
interacts with the etheric body of the rest of the organism and
that which works in the etheric body of the head causes changes
in the etheric body of the remaining organism, which then work
into the physical organism. Whenever anything takes place in
his mental-bodily life that belongs to the memory a change
appears in the etheric organism at first that continues in the
physical organism. Only because something makes impressions
into the physical body we can remember it. However, you can
only observe now with the beholding consciousness what happens
there from the etheric organism in the physical organism. This
can be observed only if the beholding consciousness continues
those exercises which I have characterised in the cited books
if the beholding consciousness advances from the mere
Imaginative knowledge to that which I have called there
“Inspirative knowledge.”

With the Imaginative knowledge, we submerge in a world of the
surging ether that is inspired by thoughts. If we continue the
exercises, we strengthen our soul life even more; we get around
to perceiving real spiritual beings within this surging life of
thoughts that reveal themselves only in the spiritual. Because
we get to the real perception of a spiritual world, we are able
to perceive ourselves as spiritual beings among other spiritual
beings in the spiritual world. Then something happens that I
can characterise quite difficultly but that you can understand
with some good will.

If
you are imagining, and the imagined remains in your soul, and
later this imagined is brought up again from the soul, you say,
you remember. But this is based, as I have just explained, on
something that goes forward in the physical organism. You
cannot pursue it only with the usual consciousness. If you
advance in the beholding consciousness, you can realise what
goes forward behind the memory what goes forward in the human
being in the time that proceeds from then on where he has
grasped a thought, which now has disappeared and lives down in
the physical organism, until it is brought up again. Everything
that lives there beyond the thought that is reminded, you do
not perceive if you cannot lift yourself out by the beholding
consciousness, and cannot look at yourself from the other side
as it were.

So
that you do not only realise that a thought goes down, and feel
it coming up again, but that you perceive everything that
happens in between. This arises only to the Inspirative
consciousness. Thus, the human being on one side arrives at a
beyond of the soul that makes sure that he lives in spirit.
However, he gets also to the beyond of the soul that works in
that which lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a
thought up to its recurrence what lives down there as the
“unconscious.” One cannot reach it with the usual
consciousness because the thought is reflected before in the
organism; but if one gets behind this reflection if you exceed
yourself and live in the beholding consciousness, you
experience what goes forward between grasping the thought and
the recollection in the human being. Now we want to retain that
which the human being can perceive as it were beyond that
stream by the beholding consciousness that is limited usually
by the memory. Since we realise that we enter into a beyond of
the soul with the beholding consciousness.

We
keep this thought in mind, and we have a glance from the same
viewpoint at some attempts, which have come out in the
scientific age.

The
scientific worldview reaches not only such wrong tracks to the
soul life as I have characterised them, but also wrong tracks
in certain respect if it wants to investigate what is beyond
the senses. Indeed, in this respect the scientific research is
in a strange situation today if it forms a worldview. It has
recognised, actually, that in the consciousness only pictures
of a reality exist. It takes a one-sided idea as starting
point; but in spite of its one-sidedness this idea gives a
certain view which is correct, namely that everything that
lives in the consciousness consists of pictures. The scientific
research takes its starting point from the idea that there is a
quite spiritless and soulless reality of swinging unthinking
ether atoms.

We
have found the ether as a surging life of thoughts; the
scientific worldview starts from the thoughtless, uninspired
ether. These oscillations work on our senses, they conjure up
the coloured, sounding world, while outdoors everything is dark
and silent. Now, however, this thinking wants to come behind
these pictures. What does it do? What it does there can be
compared, for example, with a child that looks in a mirror.
There it faces reflections of it and its surroundings. Now the
child wants to know what is there, actually, behind these
reflections. What does it do? It looks behind the mirror.
However, there it sees something else than what it has
searched. Alternatively, it smashes the mirror to see what is
behind the glass. The scientific worldview does the same. It
has the whole carpet of the sensory phenomena before itself,
and it wants to know what lives behind the sensory phenomena.
It goes so far that it approaches the material, the matter. Now
it wants to know what is there outdoors. That means smashing
the carpet that is like a mirror. It would not find that behind
it what it searches. If now anybody says, there I have the red
colour by the eye, and behind it certain oscillations are in
the ether, he talks just as somebody who believes that the
origin of that which appears in the mirror is behind the
mirror.

Since just in such a way, as if you stand before a mirror, you
see the picture of yourself from the mirror, and you are
together with that which is in the surroundings, and with that
what is reflected from itself, one is in the soul together with
that which is behind the sensory phenomena. If I want to know,
why there with me something else is reflected, there I cannot
look behind the mirror, but there I have to look at them who
are on the left and on the right who are with me of the same
nature who are also reflected. If I want to investigate what is
there outdoors behind the sensory phenomena, I have to
investigate that in which I myself am; not by smashing the
mirror, but while I investigate that, in which I am.

Indeed, one developed astute lines of thought about the ether
in scientific respect. But all these lines of thought have led
to nothing but to the fact that one has recognised nothing
else, that one gets on the way of physical research only to the
same which one also has in the sensory view before himself,
save that one cannot perceive with the senses, because
something is too subtle or runs too fast. One gets to no ether.
This is transparent today after the nice researches with the
vacuum tubes where one believed to have the ether palpable.
Since one knows today that by these experiments nothing else
comes into being than radioactive matter, not what can be
called ether. Today just the ether research is going through a
radical change. Since one will never get to something else on
the way of physical research than to that what reflects. If you
want to get further, you have to consider that but you can do
this only with the beholding consciousness what is reflected
together with you. This lives in the ether that is really
inspired by thoughts. Hence, one finds if one asks for the
beyond of the senses only an answer again with the beholding
consciousness.

Since if you recognise the surging ether inspired with thoughts
in yourself with Imaginative knowledge, you are also able to
find it behind any outer sense perception. Behind that which
the senses perceive the same lives which is found in us, if we
penetrate into that which lives there in us while we grasp a
thought and remember it again. Not on the way on which physics
goes forward or went forward up to now you get to the beyond of
the senses, but while you find that what is beyond the senses
in your being. Between grasping a thought and remembering it
again, the same process takes place that lives there outdoors
and penetrates to my eye if I perceive red. The beyond of the
senses and the beyond of the soul lead into the spiritual.

I
had to lead you through an abstract line of thought today
because I wanted to say in the context of these talks something
about the perspective that has to arise from spiritual science.
I wanted to show that real self-knowledge leads to the beyond
of the soul that, however, if one enters into the beyond of the
soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses that one
thereby finds the way, by the beholding consciousness, into the
spiritual world. In this spiritual world the Intuitive
consciousness discovers that what also takes place in our soul
life, and what I have described in the preceding talks as that
which as our destiny surges up and down in our experiences. The
experience of destiny unites with the moral, with the events of
destiny. If we only know that behind the experience of the
senses no spiritless reality but an inspired reality exists,
then our moral life also has place in the spiritual world that
is beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world
that we perceive around ourselves has place in this outer
world.

Spiritual science is regarded as something paradox even today;
the things which I have described are regarded as follies; but
they can be regarded also as facts which are simply described
as outer events can be described. However, this approach of
spiritual science is only digging in a tunnel of knowledge from
one side; from the other side natural sciences are digging in
the mountain. If both strive after the right direction, they
meet in the middle. I would like to say, in a kind of negative
way natural sciences meet spiritual science already today.
Since strange things have arisen among the scientific thinkers
of the last time. Indeed, those who mean to stand on the firm
ground of the scientific research because they know what was
discovered until twenty years ago, they do not yet know a lot
of that which scientific thinkers are really doing. If one
observes more exactly, one does quite strange discoveries.

Therefore, I have just stated Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker
who at least points to a beyond of the senses and a beyond of
the soul. However, he does not admit that it is possible to the
beholding consciousness to penetrate to the beyond of the
senses and the beyond of the soul. That is why, he says, that
which lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the
unconscious. About that, he puts up rather questionable
hypotheses. However, these are only truths of thought. The
thought does not reach these worlds. Solely the beholding
consciousness reaches them as I have described it. But, at
least: Hartmann penetrates to the notion of the fact that in
the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul
something spiritual is even if he did not become aware of it.
He gave a criticism of the materialistically interpreted
Darwinism when he published his Philosophy of the
Unconscious in 1868. The “ materialistically
interpreted Darwinism” what Darwin found as single facts
should not be discussed here believes without being able to
explain anything mental that from the imperfect simplest living
beings the more perfect ones originate by mere selection, by
the struggle for existence. Because the more perfect ones
develop by chance and overcome the imperfect ones, the perfect
ones survive; thereby a sort of a developmental order from the
imperfect to the perfect ones originates. Hartmann explained
even then that chance was not enough to explain the development
of organisms, but that certain, even if unconscious remaining
forces must be effective if the living being develops from the
imperfect to the more perfect one. Briefly, he searched
something spiritual in the evolution; he assumed hypothetically
that it could be really found beyond the senses and beyond the
soul. Since one did not yet advance to the beholding
consciousness in those days.

When now the Philosophy of the Unconscious had appeared,
many scientifically thinking persons opposed this
“dilettantish thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. Among
those who criticised Hartmann at that time was Eduard Oscar
Schmidt (1823-1886, zoologist). Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834-1919)
and numerous of his disciples who were highly surprised now
that under many writings, which refuted Eduard von Hartmann
brilliantly, also a writing appeared by an anonym. Haeckel and
others said: we consider him as one of ours. Then the second
edition of this writing The Unconscious in the Light of
Darwinism appeared. Now the author was called he was Eduard
von Hartmann. Then one hushed him. — However, one noticed
something else: in 1916, an interesting writing appeared which
is abreast with this science. This writing is titled: The
Origin of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of
Chance. This book is written by the famous disciple of
Haeckel, by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), Professor of Biology in
Berlin. We experience the strange phenomenon that the
generation of Haeckel's disciples whom he himself was very
proud of writes books already that refute Darwin's theory of
chance, which prevailed in the time, when one turned against
Hartmann just in Haeckel's circles. What does Hertwig do whom I
myself knew with his brother Richard (1850-1937, zoologist) as
one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel? He checks the
“materialistic interpretation of Darwin's theory,”
and refutes it bit by bit and quotes Eduard von Hartmann at
some places. Hartmann appears in Hertwig's writing now again,
and attains honours again. One starts now coming back again to
that what Hartmann still moved into the unconscious. One starts
now acknowledging the spiritual in the sensory.

However, this book by Oscar Hertwig is strange. Any former
materialistic interpretation of Darwinism resulted in the fact
that one said, we have perfect organisms, we have imperfect
ones. The perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones
by their outer natural forces, but Hertwig comes back to the
fact that one can prove if one investigates the first
arrangement of the embryo of the perfect organism that it
already differs from the imperfect organism that this view of
Naegeli (Carl Wilhelm von N., 1817-1891, Swiss botanist) is
right. Since in the perfect organism already is something else
than in the imperfect one of which one believes that the
perfect one has developed from it. The microscopic research has
gone up to a border, but it has also reached nothing but that
it is confronted with a mirror, and does not advance further
than to the border of the sensory world. The result will be
that many people who stand on the scientific viewpoint do not
only notice as Hertwig does that the materialistic
interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. They will rather
acknowledge: if we generally want to get to an explanation of
the sensory world, we cannot stop at the usual consciousness;
there we do not come out of the sensory world, also not with
ever so many telescopes. We come only out of the sensory world
if we attain the beholding consciousness.

However, the philosophers are also not yet far enough to
strengthen the soul so that they would recognise: the beholding
consciousness is able to originate from this usual
consciousness, as well as the wake consciousness emerges from
the dream. I have already often said that I oppose against
those whom I respect very much. Hence, I am allowed to say:
from this inability to think generally realistically and to
strive for this beholding consciousness, it has only also
resulted that people consider Eucken (Rudolf E., 1846-1926) and
others as great philosophers. Therefore, one can state that
adhering to the usual consciousness has taken the sharpness of
thinking from the human being that lets him realise that there
are not such limits of knowledge as Kant states but such limits
that one must overcome by the beholding consciousness.

There are people who suspect what I have said today. There is,
for example, a personality (Richard Wahle, 1857-1935, The
Tragicomedy of Wisdom (1915)) who suspects that the soul
life thinking, feeling and willing is caused by the body, while
the everlasting comes from the spiritual world, comes into
existence at birth, works in the body, and leaves it at death,
and that that which works in the body is not the true soul.
This personality whom I mean acknowledges this. However, he
speaks of the fact that we have only pictures in the usual
consciousness. This personality calls them
“incidents.” Behind them, those original factors
are which one experiences in the beholding consciousness, the
beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses. However, he
does not want to defer to this beholding consciousness. Thus,
he faces the incidents, while smashing I would like to say at a
thick mirror perpetually and saying, the original factors must
be behind it. — However, he is raving. While he is
running against the reflecting surface and does not want to get
to the beholding consciousness, he believes that any philosophy
has only raved. With Fichte, one can realise that he did not
rave, but that he pointed in an important point to the
beholding consciousness. That personality, whom I mean, now
says: “Someone who cannot laugh there (with
Fichte) can also not philosophise.” While this
personality lets pass by all philosophers from Plato and
Heraclitus up to the present ones, he calls these philosophies
“the tragicomedy of wisdom.” You can find an
interesting sentence on page 132: “We do not have more
philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to get
to a philosophy and the final resignation to ignorance
distinguish us from the animal.”

This is the judgement of somebody about any philosophy, about
all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the
beyond of the senses. He is really a frantic man who believes
in his rage that the others are frantic.

I
know very well that that which I say tastes bitter to some
people. I can understand this absolutely. However, I have to
point out once that it is necessary in the present to leave
that what encloses itself in the sensory world and to submerge
in that, which leads into the beyond of the soul, in the beyond
of the senses. Since the world is not that which sets the
limits of knowledge. Only the human being himself sets
them.

Sometimes one can do rather interesting discoveries that it is
the human being himself if he even does not at all want to look
at the beholding consciousness that leads him to the real
nature of the soul. I have just given a sample of a
philosophical view of a university professor, Richard Wahle,
who wrote The Tragicomedy of Wisdom. I could call
another, the famous Jodl (Friedrich J., 1849-1914). This
philosopher he does no longer live would have certainly
regarded everything that is pronounced here as sheer madness.
He expresses himself about the soul in the following way:
“The soul has neither states nor capabilities, like
thinking, imagining, joy, and hatred and so on, but these
states are in their totality the soul.” Very witty! The
whole philosophy of Jodl is intermingled with this wit.
However, this definition of the soul is not more worth than if
anybody says: the table does not have edges and a surface, but
edges and a surface are the table.

I
have called the worldview that I represent in these talks
anthroposophy. This is referring to the Anthroposophy. An
Outline (1882) by Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898, Austrian
philosopher and aesthete) who was also a university professor
who was, however, in opposition against anthroposophy. Since he
would say what he already said against Schelling: “The
philosopher must remain within that which is accessible to
thinking. He must not appeal to anything that makes a special
development of the soul necessary!”

One
can speak in such a way, and then one practises anthroposophy
as Robert Zimmermann did. There you find a scrub of thoughts in
which you will not be interested, because he says not a single
word about all questions of the soul and the spirit. From that
what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of
the senses what is connected with the question of immortality,
with the question of destiny nothing is in that anthroposophy.
Since the whole thinking of the last century has brought the
big progress of natural sciences on one side, but on the other
side also that attitude that the young Renan (Ernest R.,
1823-1892, French author) expressed in the following way when
he had lost faith in religious ideas because of the knowledge
of the modern scientific way of thinking: “The modern
human being is aware that he will never know anything of his
highest causes or his destination.” This is, in the end,
the confession of many people today, save that because the
confession already exists so long many have come to a kind of
daze and do not recognise that such a confession rankles the
soul if it is new. This confession has obstructed the ways to
itself which I have shown today to the beyond of the soul and
to the beyond of the senses. Ernest Renan was at least someone
who felt how one could live with such an obstruction. That is
why he said as an old man: “I wanted, I would know indeed
that there would be a hell, because better the hypothesis of
the hell than nothing.”

Indeed, the non-recognition of the beholding consciousness does
not lead to the knowledge of the origin and the nature of the
human being as smashing at the mirror does not lead to the
knowledge of those beings that are reflected in the mirror.
Renan felt this. He felt that where former times have searched
the spiritual origin of the human being his worldview puts
nothing. His mind protested against it, while he pronounced in
old age that he preferred to know that there is a hell than to
believe that nothing is real. As long as the mind only protests
in such way, humanity will not overcome the barriers of the
worldview which has obstructed the ways to the beyond of the
senses and the beyond of the soul up to now. Not before
humanity resolves to advance to the strengthening of thinking,
of the whole soul life to penetrate with the beholding
consciousness into the spiritual reality, then only the mind
but also the knowledge rise up against the compulsory power of
materialism which keeps the human being from a knowledge of his
real nature. I think that today one can already feel that we
live at the starting point of those upheavals of the human soul
life that lead from the knowledge of the scientific worldview
to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, to the
real origin of the human being, to the spirit.

With it, the human being will also be again able to connect
that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence with
the world origin, as he can connect that which lives in the
outer physical necessity. The human being will thereby ascend
to a really uniform and adequate view of nature and soul.